There are many things After Effects should take from Cinema 4D. One of them is the ability to hide an object from the viewport, but have it show up in the render. There are many ways you can do this in Cinema 4D...
Animating to audio is an important part of working inside of After Effects. But it can become messy very quickly. As soon as you move things around you have to manually resynchronize everything. Here’s a solution that...
After Effect’s Fill effect is a very useful effect. If you have never used you probably should look into it. It’s the simplest effect. It just applies a color onto a layer. Basic stuff. The weird thing with this effect...
A practical naming pattern for After Effects comps that makes hierarchy obvious, keeps lists readable, and scales from small projects to large ones.
In October of 2014 I started working freelance for [Blackout Design](http://blackoutdesign.ca/en/), a visual environment design company. I've had the chance to work, along with many other talented...
I recently had to prepare a couple of Illustrator files for animation (in After Effects) and found myself stumbling upon a couple of bottlenecks.
After Effects has lots of shortcuts. Having them all in the same place makes it easier to find one in particular or to just learn those available. This list has been generated from the shortcut file content which can be...
Displaying a dynamic amount of money in After Effect can quickly become a bit of a headache. Handling the various mathematic and typographic technicalities of currencies in one bulletproof expression is tricky, but not...
Expressions are a really powerful feature in After Effects. It can help you improve the quality and fluidity of your animation but it can also help you organize your project. Expressions if used well, gives you the...
You will often find yourself toggling the visibility of layers in After Effects. This can get really cumbersome and hazardous to click all those little eye icons in deeply nested compositions. Having a controller layer...
Adobe provides us some command line interface to start renders without having to start After Effects ( here's the documentation ). This can be really useful when using multiple computers on remote desktops or just to...
Sometimes, all you need is a constraint. The fear of the blank page can stop you really fast from starting something. Here are some challenges and contests you can do now to help you get creative without the hassle of...
Modifying shortcuts in After Effects is a surprisingly tedious and unintuitive task. There is no way to do it from within our interface as in Premiere Pro (Premiere Pro > Keyboard Shortcuts) or Cinema 4D (Window/Layout...
While writing After Effects scripts, I often find myself having to convert hexadecimal color to float numbers array, eg.: #f8a908 → [0.97, 0.66, 0.03]